I'm an awkward individual - why?

One of the many things my ex wife criticised me for was that I rarely trusted people. She was right, and indeed I have never been one to do as I was told, without investigating the reasons why, and considering the risks of what I was being asked to do.

Family experiences

There are a number of reasons why I'm like this: one is probably genetic. My great-grandmother hailed from West Cork, not an area known for people with the most compliant personality. Another is background: as I've mentioned in a previous blog, my childhood did not consist of the calm, protected existence that seems to be expected nowadays - possibly at least in part to the Irish connection in my family, but perhaps also due to my parents being fallible, and living through World War Two in very different environments.

Indeed, my mother and father were disparate characters: while her youth involved growing up in a small Northamptonshire town, where her mother played the organ at the local methodist church, his equally quiet development had been shattered by the war, being called up in 1943 aged 18, and taking part in the invasion of Europe the following year. I am sure his experiences influenced him greatly - he was with the Royal Artillery, in a team whose role was to destroy enemy tanks. Occasionally he spoke about it being a case of 'get them before they get you', and spoke of hearing the screams of men inside burning tanks. If that wasn't enough, once they'd made it through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and into northern Germany, in April 1945 they stopped advancing at the River Elbe. In the days that followed, instead of tracking German tanks, they were sent to what they were told was a prison camp, to help, they thought, sort out the inmates. He was not quite 20 years old at the time.

The name of that camp was Bergen-Belsen. Young readers may like to look it up on Wikipedia.

Nearly thirty years later my father took me to Celle, the nearby town where in fact he was based from then until being demobbed, but he said nothing about Belsen. I only found out his being there many years later, and only realised how close Belsen was to Celle when writing this article. 

I believe that my father's wartime experiences - and those of many of his generation - shaped attitudes that seemed to prevail in the 1960's: people have to cope with bad things. Hong Kong flu, in 1968, killed 80,000. I was nine years old at the time but barely remember it: there were no lockdowns, no face masks, no social distancing. And, of course, the Private Finance Initiative was many years away: the NHS still had capacity to cope with epidemics.

Auntie Evie

Earlier, in August 1962 I was three-and-a-half. My sister was two years older than me, and had completed her first year at school: I still had eighteen months to go before I would be old enough for education. 

My parents wanted a larger house for the four of us, but the increased costs would require my mother to take on a part time job, posing a problem regarding childcare for me. My mother suggested a solution: my father's Aunt, Auntie Evie, who had been widowed a year or so earlier (and was, apparently, hitting the gin bottle somewhat as a consequence), would come to live with us to look after me so both of my parents could go to work. Also, Auntie brought a few hundred pounds with her which could be put towards the cost of the property, enabling a large, four bedroom Edwardian semi to become our new home.

I enjoyed being looked after by Auntie when my Mum was out at work: she had travelled, having visited family in Ireland and America before the war. Near where we lived in Woodford Green there used to be a statue of Sir Winston Churchill (it's still there, I believe) and Auntie and I walked up there several times; she told me she'd been introduced to him once. I was no more than four at the time, I just accepted this and thought no more of it - I assumed most old people had met Churchill, once.

Some time after I started school in January 1964 things changed. I think it may have been because my mother was especially keen to be part of the community; our family had been regulars at church, and I am sure some of the folks from church were invited to our home, and met Auntie - who did not attend the same church. She was a catholic.

I remember being puzzled by this. Auntie believed in Jesus and the same God as us, but went to a different church. Once, perhaps around the age of seven, our sunday school session was about the different denominations of Christianity; the church we attended was a 'United Free' church, seemingly attended by a hotch-potch of methodists, anglicans and other protestants who, for some reason, didn't fit in anywhere else. At this sunday school class I think something derogatory was said by another child about catholics - perhaps repeating something they'd heard an adult say, and I in turn said something about my auntie being a catholic and I liked her. I'm not sure what else happened but I was now labelled a trouble maker, news got back to my parents and attempts were made to reduce the influence my great aunt had over me. (When in my thirties I later found out that not only was Auntie catholic, but one of her cousins had been involved  in the Easter Rising. I'm not sure if the church people ever found out about that, but it wouldn't have exactly endeared her to them, and it might have been considered good reason for them to spread scare stories about my well-being).  

Any attempts to keep me away from Auntie weren't at all successful, I continued to watch programmes like Z-Cars and Crossroads with her after school until my parent's marriage broke up, and even then I would go round to see Auntie as well as my father, sometimes in fact I would visit the former family home just to see her. This continued until my teenage years, for she died when I was fifteen. In my childhood I was probably as close to her as  I was to either of my parents, and any attempts to alter this - by parents, well-meaning family friends, church or school, just made this stubborn boy less trusting of adults. I became independent, a bit of a loner.

A difficult teenager

But it was normal for youngsters to be left to their own devices in the 1960's. A nine-year-old making their own way home from school would not be unusual; now it would cause a call to social services. Mind you, by that age having experienced the break-up of my parents' marriage and decided I didn't like church, in fact I had become quite unhappy at the involvement of some of the church people in managing my life (they no doubt thought they were helping my now single-parent mother). I do remember one unpleasant, fat woman who insisted on cuddling me in a way I really didn't like. I really didn't trust most adults - including teachers, church people and cub leaders, and wasn't wholly comfortable in the company of children I didn't know. I could even be unpredictable with those I did. I became self-reliant. If I wanted to know about something I would look it up, or read about it. I didn't like being told something and having to automatically obey.

My awkwardness was no doubt a problem for my long-suffering mother. She needed a solution to the 'what do we do about Philip' problem. It may have been someone at church suggested boarding school, I don't know, but I ended up going to Christ's Hospital, the charitable boarding school ay Horsham where the boys wore (and still wear, I believe) tudor uniforms. 

But I'd already decided I wasn't going to do religion, so it was little surprise that I didn't get on very well there. The name of the place was something of a giveaway. However my now well developed instincts about adults proved useful; of the two masters I had most contact with in my first three years, my junior house master and house tutor, one (the former) was an alcoholic, the latter a pervert, and I did my best to avoid them both. Stories abounded about the house tutor, and I had more or less forgotten about them, until - forty years after I left the place - he had his comeuppance in court. (I actually felt sorry for him, for other, more senior, staff members (including said alcoholic housemaster, and the headmaster of the time) should have been supervising him in some way: at the time of the offence, he was in his late twenties, starting out in his career. He should have been mentored perhaps; and the senior members of staff let him down by not intervening to stop him doing things he shouldn't have done. They also, of course, let down the boys he abused! Unfortunately both housemaster and headmaster had met their respective makers by the time of the prosecution; interestingly, the latter fell out with the governers of CH in 1979 when they decided they wanted to merge the girl's school (then at Hertford) with the boys at Horsham.)

I didn't excel at school, leaving at 17, and made my way awkwardly through university and early stages of career, still trusting few people, to the point that, at work, I could never face a residential course; I was put on a fast-track promotion course aged 25, but couldn't face the boarding-school type of environment. Even in my forties, when I had to travel for a course, I would stay off campus, in a hotel.

It's had its benefits

It may seem that all of the problems in my youth caused only negative consequences in later life. Sure, I've struggled with relationships - I've few friends but don't feel the need for friendship in the way that, for instance, my mother does, with her christmas card list still stretching to over a hundred names, including those of some she was at school with. I've struggled at work a bit sometimes due to my reluctance to commit to more than the contractual requirement. 

But I've developed some useful skills. Not trusting people is, believe it or not, very useful in some roles - such as a manager engaging the services of a contractor. I'm very good at going through small print, and getting to the bottom of quotes for work, for instance, and as in IT coder I was never prepared to accept that something couldn't be done just because someone said it couldn't.

Outside work, I've learned whatever I needed to do to get a job done. I've bought, and borrowed from the library, books to help with DIY whenever something needed to be done on the house. I've never fallen victim to phone fraud, where someone phones up and tells you something that ends up requiring you to pay money to a criminal, and the only computer viruses I've had to deal with have been ones someone else has imported onto my computer.

I'm suspicous of politicians - and would encourage everyone to be. They have the ability to lock you up, or take away your money to use it on whatever they want: isn't that good reason not to trust them?

What many  people find almost offensive in me is that I am very sceptical of the medical world too. By my twenties I'd been to the doctor's a few times with aches and pains and it took two or three visits to get to the bottom of the problem; I began to realise I was often better trying to sort out a medical issue myself (I've been a regular at an osteopath's for the last twenty years).

I don't trust a word that government spokesmen utter about many things, especially coronavirus. I don't believe they understand enough about science, mathematics and statistics to be able to judge things properly, and most of the advisors to the government on the topic seem to have political credentials that should rule them out of such a role.

But the greatest example of a reason as to why being cautious about what I'm told by experts is Viv. Four years ago she'd just come out of hospital, bedridden, having been told that there was nothing that could be done about the neurological problems associated with a tumour. 

That verdict was, I presume, considered by several doctors of varying levels of experience. It was delivered to me by a consultant neurologist.

At the time I had already said to staff (and complained formally to the hospital) that I didn't trust him. Things moved on, I looked after Viv at home, and subsequently challenged the diagnosis, eventually requesting a second opinion through our GP. 

I was right not to trust that consultant. It appears that he, and the other doctors who had reached the conclusion, hadn't read the radiographer's notes on one of her scans, taken at that hospital two months before she was admitted. The radiographer had noted signs of hydrocephalus - a perfectly treatable, although disabling and life threatening (if untreated), condition. 

Viv's largely recovered, is able to walk and get around quite well. We shudder to think where she would be if I'd trusted that consultant's diagnosis.

A worrying future

What I find to be curious, in fact, is that so few people question 'experts' in the way that I do. Is it that people are worried about causing offence? That's strange... some people don't even check their bank statements because they assume the banks will have got it right. Are the bank going to be offended if you check their sums?

People don't seem to want to question what they are being told in the news much either. Perhaps it's the way of things with social media .. but that has surely been shown to not be a source to trust. 

Online fraud cases continue, largely because people trust 'experts', or even just the number assigned in the caller id field on an incoming call.

Youngsters in education seem to freely take on views that, a generation ago, would have been considered controversial, at least: gender issues, BLM, 'woke' values, these all seem to be just accepted, without being challenged. Perhaps people like the apparent security of a 'fact', even it is just a theory that many agree with. Isn't it rather dangerous to take on ideas as facts when they are not?

My childhood may have been traumatic, but it set me up me very well for a world full of uncertainty and risk. I'm not sure that a more secure, molly-coddled youth would have equipped me for life in quite the same way: I might have done 'better' at school, I might have got along better with other people, but would I have coped with the many challenges and risks as well as I have done? Will today's youngsters cope with future crises as well as my and my parent's generations have, given the challenges we faced that are not faced by youngsters today?